FreshWebz Web Design Colchester

Affordable Web Design Colchester

Email : enquiries @ freshwebz.co.uk

Busy time!!

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There’s been a lot going on recently including a new blog for My Travel Extras, transferring the travel related posts from this blog; a change of web host (followed by changing straight back again!) & trying to get some more web design business.

First of all the change of web host! I decided that I should move my sites to a hosting company with its servers based in the UK as Get to the Top on Google: Tips and Techniques to Get Your Site to the Top of Google and Stay There suggests that Google.co.uk gives higher importance in the UK rankings to websites where the server is based in the UK. As I use 1and1 & their servers appear as being in Germany, this may be harming my .co.uk domains.

I chose Heart Internet as they offered web hosting at the same price, but with 100 mySQL databases as opposed to the 2 I have with 1and1. I transferred all my domains over to Heart, the .co.uk being free & the .com costing £5 each. Unfortunately, it was only when I had a number of the .co.uk domains transferred, that I realised that I was unable to apply more than one domain to the hosting account unless I paid a “domain mapping” charge of £20pa for each other domain!

With around 30 domains, there was no way it was worth doing that, so the only alternative was a reseller account, whereby I would also be selling web hosting! As this cost a minimum of £25 per month, with no guarantee of selling any hosting, I couldn’t consider doing this & was gutted that I’d spent loads transferring the domains over & now would end up paying through the nose for something I didn’t really need.

I have to say that this domain mapping was not something mentioned anywhere on the hosting section of the Heart site & now I will be very cautious about it if I ever consider changing my hosting again!!! It was only by going through the support database, that I found any reference to it!

I decided to bite the bullet, take the loss & transfer my domains back to 1and1 :o/  Luckily however, the .com transfers had not been completed and so they could be cancelled & the charges refunded. Because Heart also offers a 30 day money back guarantee, I got my hosting costs back too <phew>. I would like to say thanks to the support team at Heart Internet though, who responded to my enquiries within minutes & were very helpful in sorting this problem out, even though they were losing a customer. Excellent customer service – if only Tiscali could be like this, but that’s another story!

I decided to also set up a separate blog for My Travel Extras, removing all the travel related posts from this one. Whether it makes a difference or not I’m not sure, but I presume that travel related content on the travel site would be viewed better by Google, than travel related posts on a web design domain. Fingers crossed this may help bring some visitors to My Travel Extras which has not been setting the world on fire recently and may even benefit the Freshwebz rankings too!

How the bounce rate of your website can affect your Google rankings

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Does Google use the bounce rate of a web page to specify the position of that page in the search results? What does this mean for your website rankings and what can you do to get a lower bounce rate?

What is the bounce rate?

There are two definitions: the bounce rate of your website is the percentage of visitors who see just one page of your website or the percentage of visitors who stay on your site for a small amount of time (only a few seconds).

The bounce rate helps you to measure the quality of traffic that your website gets and it also helps you to find out where your web pages could be improved.

Does Google use the bounce rate as a ranking factor?

Google has the ability to collect the bounce rate with the Google toolbar and Google Analytics. In addition, Google can measure the time between visits to their search engine by the same user and they can use the Google Chrome browser to measure the complete surfing behaviour of users.

Last month, a webmaster performed a test that showed a significant ranking change as a result of a significant bounce rate change. The test is not very conclusive but chances are that Google really uses the bounce rate as a ranking factor.

The bounce rate alone might not be used by Google but combined with other factors, it could have an effect on the rankings. For example, Google could measure how many people start a new search for the same topic after visiting your web page. That would be an indicator that your website is not suitable for the chosen keyword.

What can you do to lower the bounce rate of your web pages?

A high bounce rate is usually a sign of a low quality web page. This means that your web page either doesn’t offer what the visitor is searching for or the usability of your web page isn’t good.

If you improved the contents and the usability of your web pages, you might lower your bounce rate from 75% to 65%. This would lead to a remarkable 40% increase in conversions (35 out of 100 visitors now stay on your website instead of 25 out of 100 visitors).

In addition to improving the usability of your web pages, you can lower your bounce rate by tailoring your landing pages to the keywords and ads that you run. If your landing pages offer the information that the searchers are looking for then you will get a lower bounce rate.

Lowering the bounce rate of your web pages has two major benefits: it’s likely that you will get more visitors from search engines and you will get a higher conversion rate. The only exceptions to the scenario above are one page websites and web pages that offer very compelling content on a single web page (for example Wikipedia pages).

Recent web design work

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It’s been sometime since I blogged about web design work that I’ve been doing – is there any time in-between affiliate marketing for other things?!!! :oO  Well, I suppose I have to earn some money to pay for the advertising, which sometimes seems like a bottomless pit!

A few months ago, I was asked to build a website for Change Social Care – a London based recruitment agency, with over 20 years experience specialising in the recruitment of quality Social Care Professionals & Administration and Secretarial Staff for Public and Private Sectors.

The budget for the job was around £300, even though the site took some time to complete, due to the regular re-writing of the content :o/  But, the site was finally completed to the satisfaction of the client & has been up & running now for some months.

I was contacted recently by an advertising agency, to build a 3 page website within a couple of days! They supplied all the copy & the site was built & uploaded on schedule, at a cost of just £100! The site www.mediatalent.co.uk is pretty basic, but looks fine & what do you expect for £100?!!!!

The major project I’ve been working on for some time has been for Roberts Roofing, a London roofing contractor working on projects worth £4 million last year! So, the pressure was on with this site!! They already had a website, built by the company itself, but wanted it brought up to date & modernised.

The new site was designed with a great deal of CSS and was constructed to emphasise the projects they have worked on, showing decent quality images of them. They wanted clean, simple lines & all relevant information to be available within a few clicks of each other, whilst removing a lot of the personalisation that had existed on the original site.

The site has finally been finished & the client is VERY pleased with it – so am I :o)

Links from .edu and .gov domains have no special value

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Many webmasters and marketers think that a website will get a ranking boost on Google if it has links from .edu or .gov domains. Google’s Matt Cutts and Google’s John Mueller recently said that this wasn’t so:

“This is a common misconception – you don’t get any PageRank boost from having an .edu link or .gov link automatically. If you get an .edu link and no one is linking to that .edu page, you’re not going to get any PageRank at all because that .edu page doesn’t have any PageRank. […] We generally treat all links the same – be it from .gov or .edu or .info sites.”

Official Google statement: how to get high rankings

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This month, the Google Webmaster blog published an article, in which Google’s Maile Ohye officially explained what it takes to get a high ranking in Google’s search result pages.

Inbound links are important but content is even more important

Google’s Maile Ohye writes the following about inbound links in his article:

“Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.”

Nothing new here! If many related websites link to your site, and if these links look natural, this will help your rankings on Google a lot.

However, links are not the most important ranking factor & he gives a concrete example:

“Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site.

As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking. “

The website’s content is mentioned as one of the strongest ranking factors. The inbound links are additional. That makes sense; it’s the content of your website that really tells Google what your website is about.

If you want to get a high ranking for the keyword “used cars in essex”, but your web pages are about microwave ovens, then you won’t get high rankings for that keyword.

For that reason, it is very important that you optimise your web pages for the keywords for which you want to get high rankings, before you try to get links from other sites. This optimisation should also be an ongoing process as keyword popularity may vary over time.

Google analyses over 200 ranking factors

According to the article in Google’s blog, Google analyses more than 200 signals (we call them ‘ranking factors’) to specify the position of a web page in the search results:

“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

It’s a simple two-step process

Apparently, getting high rankings on Google is a simple two-step process!!

  1. You must optimise your web page contents so that Google can find out what your website is about. Optimise your web pages for your keywords so that Google knows that your website is relevant to these keywords and your topic.
  2. Other websites must confirm that your website is about that topic. That’s what inbound links are for.

Hmmm, we all knew that didn’t we? So why is it so hard to do then?!!!!! ;o)

FreshWebz Web Design Colchester

We are a web design company specialising in working with small to medium-sized businesses. We offer high quality website design, as well as a range of other online web services, for any individual, sole trader, small business, SME or UK company. Our services are geared to both new and established business owners requiring a professional, affordable website design solution with local on-going Colchester based support. Contact us for an informal chat, to see how we can improve your business' web presence!

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